A new survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University has found that nearly one in five high school students drink, smoke or do drugs during the school day!
High school feels like such a long time ago for me. In fact, I just went back home to Miami to celebrate my 20th high school reunion, so it has been a long time! But I still remember how a few kids would come to school high and it was so obvious because of their glassy eyes and how they reeked of marihuana. What I don't remember is any of them being drunk or using any drugs other than pot. That, apparently, has changed a lot since my high school years.
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The survey found out even more: Of the 1,000 students surveyed, 50 percent said they knew who deals drugs at school and where to go to geet high. While marijuana was the easiest and most common drug being bought on school grounds, prescription drugs, cocaine and ecstasy followed close behind.
But the most intersting finding to come out of the survey–at least for me–was how much pressure social media presents to these students ages 12 to 17. Kids who saw photos of their classmates on Facebook, for example, drinking, doing drugs or passed out were four timer likelier to have smoked pot, and three times likelier to have used alcohol or to have smoked cigarettes, according to the survey.
It's called digital peer pressure and it's the first time the survey sees its real power. Like Joseph Califano, a former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare told the New York Daily News:
Digital peer pressure moves beyond a child's friends and the kids they hang out with. It invades the home and a child's bedroom via the Internet.
As always, the recommendation here is to talk to your children about alcohol and drugs, but to also know what's going on in their social media outlets. Get to know your child's friends and be involved–in a healthy way–in his or her life as much as possible.
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If this is how things are right now, I can't even imagine the kinds of things my own children will be facing when they become teenagers. As I've said in the past, I'm really not looking forward to that time…
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Image via Torben Bjørn Hansen/flickr
